The Coun­cil of Evan­gel­i­cal Church­es wants an ur­gent and thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the rob­bery and des­e­cra­tion of the Taber­na­cle of Prayer Church in Port-of-Spain.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the church was bro­ken in­to twice in 72 hours.

The church, lo­cat­ed along Aber­crom­by Street, was stripped of all its elec­tron­ic equip­ment, in ad­di­tion to food ham­pers for the less for­tu­nate in the com­mu­ni­ty.

Se­nior Pas­tor, Bish­op Jan­kee Raghu­nanan, told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the first rob­bery took place last Fri­day. The break-in was cap­tured on CCTV cam­eras.

Four men are seen in the footage, with one en­ter­ing through the roof and open­ing the door for the oth­ers to gain en­try in­side.

Bish­op Raghu­nanan said when the church staff ar­rived at 10 am on Sat­ur­day, they re­alised the men made a mock­ery of the house of God by drink­ing all the com­mu­nion wine, scat­ter­ing the bot­tles on the floor, and smear­ing the chairs with sar­dines.

He said the church was cleaned up and an­oth­er pas­tor who learned about the rob­bery do­nat­ed a sound sys­tem for their Sun­day ser­vice.

But by Mon­day morn­ing, they re­alised that too was stolen af­ter ban­dits broke in­to the church again.

Bish­op Raghu­nanan es­ti­mat­ed the loss­es to be around $190,000. He ad­mit­ted that he was sad­dened and heart­bro­ken by how the acts were done.

The Bish­op al­so ques­tioned the lev­el of moral­i­ty of the per­pe­tra­tors, since the crimes were com­mit­ted dur­ing the Lenten sea­son, which leads up to the holi­est time on the Chris­t­ian cal­en­dar—East­er.

In a state­ment, Rev­erend Dr Desmond Austin, pres­i­dent of the Coun­cil of Evan­gel­i­cal Church­es, lament­ed what he called the lack of pub­lic out­cry over the break-ins.

He said, “When oth­er re­li­gious groups faced sim­i­lar at­tacks in re­cent months, many pub­licly ex­pressed their dis­gust, and right­ly so be­cause all places of wor­ship are sa­cred.”

He asked where were the voic­es in sol­i­dar­i­ty with Bish­op Raghu­nanan, his con­gre­ga­tion and the Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty.

Bish­op Raghu­nanan said po­lice of­fi­cers are ac­tive­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing both break-ins and have sourced CCTV footage from near­by es­tab­lish­ments.

Last year, there were sev­er­al break-ins at places of wor­ship.
Po­lice al­so had to in­crease pa­trols around Hin­du tem­ples af­ter items were stolen or the tem­ples des­e­crat­ed. There were al­so acts of van­dal­ism and theft at church­es.